INFORMATION WARFARE: COMING, READY OR NOT.

By Rachel Chalmers Depending on who you believe, the United States is either desperately vulnerable to information warfare, or hopelessly paranoid about it. A think tank in Washington DC leans towards the first point of view. More than 20 nations have already penetrated US information systems, according to a report from Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The writers warn that terrorists and rogue nations could destabilize targets like the United States by using computer networks, communications systems and databases. "America's adversaries know that the country's real assets are in electronic storage," the report claims. "Bytes, not bullets, are the new ammo." The CSIS contends that addressing the threat will entail "unconventional, even radical" decisions. The writers believe that: "The major-regional-conflict standard on which the US military currently bases its planning is increasingly irrelevant as information systems become the more likely target of attack." Recommendations include developing new national security policies which take information warfare into account, making strategic information dominance a national security objective, ensuring the security of critical government services, understanding and working with the private sector, preparing the US military for information age conflict and readying US intelligence for the new breed of threats. It's probably not entirely a coincidence that all of these measures would tend to hand more power to military forces scrambling for relevance in a post Cold War environment. How seriously should we take all this? By coincidence, Phil Agre, a professor of information studies at UCLA, posted another report along similar lines to his Red Rock Eater News Service. Agre, however, came up with radically different conclusions. According to him, the recommendations outlined in the CSIS report were implemented years ago. Agre described for the first time his experiences at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference in October 1997. There, military experts described the consequences of having to purchase software and systems from the private sector rather than from traditional custom defense contractors. Since civilian security standards are not up to those required for military purposes, one consequence of using off-the-shelf technology is the increasing militarization of all software. "Warfare, in fact, can no longer be comprehended in spatial terms," Agre wrote. "To the contrary, in a world where communications infrastructure is everywhere and every element of communications infrastructure is a sensitive military target, war has no spatial limits." The end of the Cold War gave people a sense of security that turns out to have been unjustified, Agre claimed. "In the world of the internet, it would seem, things have only gotten worse," he wrote, "we are now in a world of permanent, total, omnipresent, pervasive war." Whether you believe the CSIS that the United States is woefully unprepared for information attack, or Agre that the military is already so over-sensitized that it regards every network node as a strategic beachhead, one thing is clear: political and economic control of the internet infrastructure is fast becoming one of the most hotly contested issues on earth.